The Joy of Uber Driving Read online

  One aspect of my life I hadn’t counted on being in the way of my happiness was my inability to form intimate relationships with men. Naturally, when my happiest moments were on stage in a surreal and brightly colored fake setting and a readymade script, coming face to face with common reality up close in broad daylight was unappealing and inherently boring. To appease the situation and spice up my reality with a little drama, I often played the part of Bette Davis’s Jezebel, pushing boys away who got too close (especially pimply-faced ones).

  Somewhere around thirteen years of age I remember screaming with the passion of a caged wild animal, “I can’t be anything to anybody until I love myself!” This was directed at my domineering grandmother, who was intent on making a lady out of me by teaching me to be all things to all people. I had forgotten this episode until just recently, and now I clearly recognize it as a declaration of my soul’s purpose for living and possibly helping others learn how to love themselves. Ten years ago my passion for empowering women to love themselves was revealed to me through my photography. I particularly focused on women over forty and dressed them in long flowing gowns with chiffon scarves to dance or pose with in nature. I saw that an authentic feminine beauty and strength emerged as they related to nature symbiotically.

  I’m compelled to mention a little more about my “domineering” grandmother after reading an old news article about her being heralded as an up-and-coming concert pianist in Parisian social circles in her mid-twenties. She married my grandfather in 1910 after knowing him for less than a month. What a woman! Later she and Grandpa ended up in the Bay Area, where he practiced medicine. She was a close friend of Clara Clemens, the daughter of Mark Twain, whom she met in Vienna, where they were both students of music. This all helped me to understand her insistence on teaching me the social graces. Perhaps if I hadn’t been so defiant, I would have also married early in life—that is, if I could overcome my fear of marriage as a deterrent to happiness.

  I consider myself lucky that I actually stood up to her, whereas my dad could not as a young boy and did not as a young man. He suffered enumerable assaults on his manhood by this woman who, among other things, made the mistake of dying his only pair of corduroy pants pink and forcing him to wear them throughout his senior year of high school (this was during the 1930’s depression). The ripple effect was a dad who I have disparaged throughout this book as a selfish, egotistical womanizer. He may have been, but I’m here to counter those accusations with the fact that I am a chip off the old block. He is my mirror. He is the part of me that I used to sabotage my happiness and later used as an excuse, which I could complain about in one personal growth workshop after another. If I have a Twin Flame, I would guess he is it. We were so much alike, and I was always “Daddy’s girl.” From the time I was seven, he was there coaching me and doing everything he could to help me fulfill my dreams. God bless you, Daddy. Just know how much I love you and please forgive me for writing this book.

  MY HEART BELONGS TO DADDY

  So Take a Hike, Laddie

  Prepared for another fabulous day of Uber driving, I turned on my cell phone and clicked on the Uber app to say I was available and ready to work.

  I offered a prayer of intention to serve for the highest good. I sat with eyes closed, windows up, engine off, as I chanted my familiar but heartfelt mantra: “I accept myself as an aspect of the Creator in full manifestation. I align every aspect of my being to this truth. I know who I am, I know what I am, and I know how I serve. I serve with joy, love, great gratitude, and the highest intentions so that all who enter this car may feel safe, appreciated, happy, and perhaps just a little inspired to know and love themselves more. Thank you, Mother Father God, for allowing me this opportunity to serve and to grow. Thank you for this beautiful day on Planet Earth.”

  I opened my eyes, pressed the engine button, and quietly pulled out of my parallel parking space in front of my house when . . .

  PING! I was summoned to a house on a steep windy one-lane street in Mill Valley, where a guy named Darren stood with stooped shoulders and a downcast expression. He opened the door and half-heartedly said “Hi . . . thanks for picking me up.” I inquired as to where he was headed, and he simply said, “My therapist in the city.”

  There was a long pause followed by a deep sigh, then I finally asked, “How are you?”

  Tentatively he said, “Miserable and a little paranoid.”

  Sensing he may want to vent his feelings, I asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I was actually surprised when he brightened and said, “Yes!” and exclaimed, “Have you ever felt like everyone in your life is in on a joke about you?”

  “Uh . . . no, I don’t think so. What do you mean?”

  “Well, it feels like I’m a laughing stock. I don’t know, it just seems everyone is judging me and whispering behind my back and maliciously snickering.”

  Cautiously, I queried, “I’m so sorry. What happened that makes you think that?”

  “Oh, nothing in particular. Maybe it’s because I’m thirty-five and living with my parents. They don’t understand. I have been trying really hard to find a job and get out on my own again, but the jobs offered don’t pay enough to live here.”

  Oh-oh . . . I felt my social worker self and all my years of spiritual training coming on and just couldn’t resist the temptation. I went headlong into the fray and offered my own experience to ease him into a new reality: “You know what? I remember when I also went home to live with my mother in my thirties and thought everyone was judging me behind my back, only to find out later that I had imagined the whole thing when I confronted them about it.”

  “Wow!” he said, amazed. “My therapist had the same experience and came up with the same conclusion. He said our thoughts create our reality. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  I smiled and nodded.

  Squinting suspiciously, he said, “Are you two in cahoots?”

  I laughed. “Oh, come on, stop with the paranoia already!”

  He lightened up and began going into great detail about all the jobs he had applied for and why they were not what he wanted. I asked what he really wanted, to which he replied with another fifteen minutes of rhapsodic descriptions and calculations of a future he passionately desired. We arrived at his destination and his face showed a far different countenance with shining eyes and color in his cheeks. He left thanking me for letting him talk and said he felt much better.

  I thought, Thank you, God, for reminding me that my own reality is a mirror of my thoughts and then giving me the opportunity to fortify his therapist’s work with my experience. That’s what “Ubering” is all about.

  In 1957 I was accepted at Cal Berkeley as a legacy candidate. I transferred to UCLA in 1960 because of their great art and drama departments, but I dropped out in my senior year. Prior to leaving UCLA, you could say I was a passenger in my life. My parents firmly gripped the wheel, providing me with all the financial support I needed and guiding my choices with a certain amount of appreciated parental wisdom. However, Mom and Dad got a divorce the day I entered college, which called their wisdom into question. The fact that they waited so long to divorce proved a lack of wisdom from my point of view, but it also proved how unselfish and caring they were toward me, to wait until I was safely out of the house.

  I was born into a life of privilege, as we were “nouveaux-riche,” my dad being a new and popular pediatrician in Whittier. Early on, a local politician named Richard Nixon and his family became his regular patients. Years later, we had the (dubious) honor of visiting Nixon in his DC office when he became Eisenhower’s vice president. People in DC thought he was the “Golden Boy” at that time. Interesting how time changes perceptions when one’s true nature is revealed.

  Dad was energetically outgoing, and flamboyant, and loved being the center of attention, oftentimes doing impromptu performances on his squeaky violin or slapping his big bass fiddle. Mother was quiet and reserved, always
in the background, and chronically unhappy. Dad thrived on collecting status symbols such as a large three-story house with a pool in Whittier, another house in the desert, one at the beach, a cabin in the mountains, and later, an apartment in Avalon. He also had a penchant for buying a new car every six months, which ranged from European sports cars to Cadillac sedans, much to my mother’s constant frustration at not being able to coax him into buying the needed paint job and repairs for the house in Whittier.

  In a sense, Mom was also a status symbol, being the daughter of Frederick Johnson, the president of Bell Telephone in Canada at the time. Dad and Mom met at McGill University in Montreal when he was in med school. I always had the feeling that “Nan and Grandy Johnson” looked down their noses at my dad, thinking him to be the opportunist that he, in fact, was. My grandfather, who looked exactly like King George, Queen Elizabeth’s father, intrigued me. He carried himself regally, with one hand behind on the small of his back as he walked down the hill to his office. They originally came from England, and when he became president of Bell Telephone of Canada, they were invited to dine with the queen at Buckingham Palace.

  We visited them five times in my lifetime, once when I was four, then when I was eight or nine, again when I was fifteen, again in 1967 for the World’s Fair, and lastly in my mid-thirties. On my first visit at the age of four, I embarrassed a dinner guest when I sat on her lap and asked why she wore two girdles. In the winter, the women congregate in the bedroom and adjust their clothes before coming to dinner. I was privy to the room, where I observed this strange tradition. I remember being immediately shuttled off to the attic, where I was left for about two hours. I yelled and cried and yelled, but nobody came. I was so angry I found a pair of scissors and cut one side of my long ash blond hair off. That is the only negative memory I have of Montreal.

  They had a large apartment on Cote des Neiges with a maid who was also their cook and Andy the chauffeur, who picked us up in New York when I was fifteen and drove us to Montreal. I remember having oatmeal served in a beautiful bone china bowl and a fine linen napkin adorned with a silver serviette holder, and from that time forward, oatmeal mush was a delicacy to me.

  The truth is, I was embarrassed by our show of wealth, as almost all my school friends were far less well to do. When I was gifted with my first car on my sixteenth Christmas, I was depressed, convinced that I wouldn’t be liked by my peers, because I was the first girl to own a car in my high school. It didn’t help that it was an ugly old black ’39 Nash. It turned out I became more popular for the very reason I thought the other girls would hate me: I had a car.

  I think part of my mom’s sadness came from feeling like a wall-flower whenever she and Dad were around other women. My dad openly flirted and later succumbed to having affairs with some of them. I caught him on a couple of occasions, fondling a female guest in the darkened kitchen while a party commenced in the living room, or kissing a guest outside by the pool, which was far removed from the house. Our next-door neighbor was a particular threat to Mom, but being that it was in the mid-fifties, nothing was ever spoken of or alluded to. The grownups all knew how to hide their feelings and suspicions quite well while pretending to have perfect marriages and to be the best of friends with each other.

  My poor mother really had no one to talk to about anything relevant or important, such as her feelings about my dad. It just wasn’t done. She came from an old-world English family whose very conservative values placed importance on good manners and social mores. Consequently, she was not able to express herself or defend herself when arguing with my dad, which they did on a regular basis in angry hushed tones behind closed doors. As for showing affection toward each other, I remember them kissing only once when he came home from work. I thought it strange but nice at the time. More importantly, she was unable to show outward affection toward me. I don’t remember her ever hugging me or comforting me when I was sad or hurt as a child. Maybe she did, I just can’t seem to remember.

  She was not a mean woman. She was gentle and kind and had a good heart, just not overtly affectionate. She once confessed to me that she had been in love with someone else, but Dad swept her off her feet, and before she knew what happened, they were married. She told me she was glad, because otherwise she never would have had me (she said with a wistful sigh).

  Her bottled-up rage toward my dad turned into severe migraine headaches that lasted for weeks. I remember her often lying in bed in a darkened room with an icepack on her forehead. I had to learn to cook Dad’s dinner every night during this time. She finally had a nervous breakdown, which resulted in an epileptic seizure while at a garden party. I believe the seizure partly came from the myriad drugs Dad prescribed for her. They eventually became her ultimate demise. Forty years later, she was taking fourteen drugs prescribed by two different doctors, which resulted in a massive stroke at the end of her life.

  PING! A woman named Jackie called from her doctor’s office in Marin. When she emerged and approached my car, I saw a “mystery” woman I thought to be in her mid-fifties. She sported a wide-brimmed hat, big dark glasses, and a turtleneck sweater beneath a long black coat in the middle of summer. A bag full of prescription drugs rattled in the back seat beside her. It sounded as if she were opening each bottle and counting the capsules in the back seat while I drove the entire distance to her home twelve miles away. We didn’t engage in a conversation until we got close to her home, and I asked what she did for a living. She said she had been a publicist but was basically retired now.

  As she spoke to me, she took off her sunglasses, and I was shocked to see a very young and beautiful woman. I asked her why she was trying to hide, and she replied that she’d gained so much weight from her medications that her husband criticized her incessantly. A big alarm bell went off in my head as I recognized a common form of self-loathing felt by women with abusive husbands. I told her she was extremely beautiful and that maybe her husband should get glasses or, even better, see a psychiatrist. She shook her head, let out a derisive laugh, and murmured under her breath, “That’ll be the day!”

  Having arrived at her house, I stopped the car, turned off the engine, and turned around to face her. “I’m serious. You should look at yourself and see what I see. I know someone who might be able to help both of you see what I see.” With that, I gave her a card of a personal friend who was a well-known marriage counselor and love therapist in the area. She looked at me in disbelief as she took the card from my hand. After a long pause, she smiled and said thank you and opened the door to leave. She stood there watching me as I drove away.

  Going back to my father. I don’t blame Dad for my mother’s death. He only prescribed what he knew to be the best medicine at the time. However, his medical ignorance spilled over onto my thirtieth birthday when he announced, while dining at a restaurant he picked for my birthday, that I’d probably inherited my mother’s epilepsy. It was a very strange and hurtful way of celebrating my birthday. He probably wasn’t aware that her migraines and so-called epileptic seizures stopped the day she divorced him.

  When I was ten, they adopted my baby brother, David. He was a diversion that served to forestall their eventual divorce. I don’t remember much about him growing up. It wasn’t until Mom died that we became close through our shared grief, and later, we helped our father through his transition.

  David was, by nature, always a very private person, while I was all wrapped up in my self-absorbed dreams, leaving little room for anything or anyone else. We didn’t share any interests or personal goals. We were strangers who lived in the same house, only barely aware of each other. We have since grown very fond of each other. Basically, he is my rock. I know I can depend on him in a pinch.

  My shadowy impression of my dad started at the age of four while we were in Phoenix visiting our relatives. I’d been put in a guestroom for bed that night when suddenly the door flew open. There was Dad, chasing one of my aunts. He pounced on her in a drunken stupor and pulled her dress
over her head. Several people rushed into the room and dragged him away from her. I don’t remember anyone being concerned that I had witnessed the whole shocking incident. I think I pretended to be asleep. So it was that I came to expect this kind of behavior from my father as being normal. I think it also colored my opinion of men in general. It’s normal for them to act like animals around pretty women, isn’t it?

  Growing up, I was faced with a dichotomy regarding my father. On the one hand, I looked askance at him as an insufferable egoist, while on the other hand, he was my strong, handsome, intelligent benefactor. He was very proud of me, so I became Daddy’s girl. He championed my singing talent, and he loved to show me off to his friends. However, rather than feeling empowered, I was often annoyed at his obvious ploy to get attention for himself. He’d ask me to sing as he awkwardly strummed his new electric guitar to accompany me.

  Once, I let him accompany me at a high school event honoring our football team where I was asked to perform. For some (Freudian) reason, I positioned him out of sight behind the curtain onstage while I sang “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” Everyone thought I was singing to Mike, whose wife had just had a baby, and I was given a standing ovation. When my dad came bounding out from behind the curtain, I begrudgingly introduced him as the reason for my song.

  I believe my ambivalence toward him was set in concrete when he came home from a party once without my mother, just to practice his guitar with my singing. When I asked him where Mom was, he told me he’d left her on the sidewalk outside the nightclub and had sped away to come home and be with me. He was so cavalier about it. I felt a deep sadness for my mother.

  PING! I had just brought someone from Marin to San Francisco around 6:30 p.m. when a call came in to pick someone up from a bar on Castro Street. Stopping at the appointed corner, I watched a man and a woman head toward me from across the street. They were holding hands and laughing gaily. He was a tall, confident, and very straight-looking white bespectacled businessman of about forty-five, and she was a stunning black woman around thirty, shapely and well dressed. They whispered and laughed throughout their ride to the hotel. When I asked them where they were from, they mentioned that they were both doctors from different parts of the country attending a physicians’ convention. In their private conversation, I overheard them talk briefly about their respective spouses. When I let them off at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, he put his arm around her and kissed her as they walked into the hotel.